Month: June 2013

One of my friends – who is a marketer for a small business – recently asked me this question:

Q: When people request a free sample or download our manual, there’s a link on those pages to sign up for our newsletter. I was thinking of adding the link to the automatic email they receive after they fill out the form for the sample or manual. Is that too much?

A: The short answer is no.

And here’s a long answer and explanation to back that up. When I switched careers from journalism to higher education PR/social media marketing about a decade ago (oh man, I’m old), I had a tough time with content reuse and using the same links on multiple web pages. “Won’t people get sick of seeing the same thing all over the place?” I thought.

But here’s the thing: People don’t pay attention. They’re not seeing the same thing over and over again. Why?

People don’t enter your website through the same place and take the path that you use or laid out for them to discover information. Maybe you have a link to your newsletter on your homepage (which you should have anyway!). But what if your most popular page is your events calendar? What if people find your blog first when they do a Google search? You never know how, when or what page people first enter your website. So if there are important resources or actions you want people to take, make that part of your template for every page.

Your audience is not the same group of people across your platforms. Your website visitors, blog readers, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and Pinterest board followers might have some overlap, but all of those people are not going from channel to channel to follow your every move. Some might not know you have a presence in other places. Or they might forget to check! That happens to me all the time. I’ve been a fan of HGTV on Facebook forever, but did not even think about following them on Twitter until I saw one of their commercials that featured fan tweets. And right after I typed that sentence, I realized that I was not following the HGTV Pinterest boards either. Done! My point: If you’re posting to one network more than others, the people on your other channels who aren’t following you there might miss it. And – for those of us who are following you on other channels – we’re all getting flooded with content, so even if we are following you on Facebook, we might miss a post there, but could see it in your newsletter or on Twitter instead.

No one is going to notice but you. Who knows every link, every photo, every bit of content on your website, blog, email newsletters, autoresponder emails, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and Google+? You, your boss, and anyone else who works on marketing for your business. Everyone else is coming and going quickly, and bouncing along to the next thing. You are the only one scrutinizing your Facebook page for hours and hours. Reusing links and content is going to only look repetitive to you because you’re the only one seeing it everywhere.

I have more LinkedIn connections than Facebook friends – 371 on LinkedIn and 269 on Facebook. That’s because of my personal rules for adding people to those networks. I’m happy to connect with people on LinkedIn who I’ve worked with, known in person, or crossed paths with digitally. But I really don’t want all of those business contacts to have access to the personal details I share on Facebook.

Since Facebook tends to be a place where the conversation mostly leans toward personal than professional, I’ve found my LinkedIn community to be a place where I can learn more about the people in my network, tap into their collective skills of the people in my network, and discover new connections. And LinkedIn has a few resources to help me do that – some “secret” resources that you might not know about.

This is my favorite LinkedIn feature. LinkedIn InMaps is a product of LinkedIn’s analytics team, and is an “interactive visual representation of your professional universe, based on the relationships between your connections.” InMaps organizes your contacts into color-coded clusters, and it’s pretty easy to tell what past jobs and connections have influenced each cluster.

Here’s what mine looks like:

The most interesting part of my InMap is the connections I’ve made during my current position at Constant Contact. I’ve been there a little over 2 years, and that’s the largest cluster of connections – even larger than connections by positions I’ve had for 4 or 5 years.

You can also see which people you’re connected to in your network are connected to others in your network, just by clicking their name. The larger that person’s dot is, the more shared connections you have.

In this example, you can see visually who my colleague Dave Charest is connected to – their threads are darker than the non-connections. The right sidebar of the page lists that connection’s title, resume highlights, and some of your shared connections; there’s a link you can click on to see all of your connections.

LinkedIn’s mobile app allows you to sync your phone’s Outlook calendar with your LinkedIn contacts so you can get to know more about the people you’re meeting and working with. To get started, click on the blue LinkedIn logo on the app, then choose calendar, and allow access to your phone’s calendar.

The calendar sync function automatically pulls invitees’ profiles and adds their photos to your scheduled events. In my case, most of my meetings are with people I already am connected to, but this is a great tool if you have meetings scheduled with people who are new to you, or are from other companies.

Alumni Search Feature

Curious to see if any of your fellow college alumni work in your area and in your industry? LinkedIn makes this easy to do with their alumni search feature. To use it, click on Network in the LinkedIn menu bar, and then choose FindAlumni.

LinkedIn will automatically pull alumni for the college in your profile – if you have degrees from multiple colleges, you can choose the one you want to search for.

Choose which graduation years you’re interested in, and you’ll see the top 5 cities, companies and careers for alumni from that time period. Want to see results for a certain city, company and career? Click See more at the bottom of the top 5 to expand for more options. Click on the ones you want, and find alumni connections in your field.

I searched for all graduation years – there aren’t a whole lot of Purdue University grads in the Boston area, but it was interesting to see that there were some fellow alumni nearby who are in marketing and communications. Go Boilers!